Browsing by Author "Potgieter, Sebastian Johann Shore"

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    “Barbed-Wire Boks” : the long shadow of the 1981 Springbok Tour of New Zealand and the United States of America
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2017-03) Potgieter, Sebastian Johann Shore; Grundlingh, Albert; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of History.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In 1981, during the height of apartheid, the South African national rugby team, the Springboks, toured to New Zealand and the United States of America. In South Africa, the tour was expected to reopen the doors to international competition for the Springboks after an anti-apartheid sporting boycott had forced the sport into relative isolation during the 1970s. In the face of much international condemnation, the Springboks toured to New Zealand and the USA in 1981 where they encountered large and often violent demonstrations as those who opposed the tour attempted to scuttle it. For the duration of the tour, New Zealand was plunged into a divisive state of chaos as police and protestors clashed outside heavily fortified rugby stadiums. In South Africa, those bleary-eyed rugby fans who braved the early morning hours to watch the historic live broadcasts of the matches were greeted with extraordinary scenes: rugby fields being combed for glass shards, fishhooks, and nails scattered by anti-tour protestors; a pitch invasion at Hamilton forcing the cancellation of the Springboks’ match against Waikato; and the infamous Auckland test, dubbed the ‘flour-bomb’ test. While the tour matter polarised New Zealanders, there were only minor disruptions during the USA leg of the tour as rugby was still a relatively unknown sport to most Americans. Although the tour events were a rude awakening to many white South Africans on the hostilities abroad towards the apartheid regime, the country’s racist policies remained unyielding. However, the tour had repercussions for South African rugby and reflected how desperate establishment rugby had become to stave off total isolation. While the tour is frequently mentioned in work on the sporting boycott era, it is rarely assigned the significance it deserves. Using hitherto untapped archival material this thesis concerns an in depth discussion on the 1981 tour, what it revealed about South African rugby at the time, and in particular how the tour had a large hand in bringing about South African rugby’s total isolation in the 1980s.